The last time I saw these titles on a screen this large was in the summer of 1984 at the Venetian Plaza 6 in Venice, Florida. Karen took me there to see it and we stopped afterward at Taco Bell for one of the souvenir glasses1.

I watched it last night here in Jacksonville at the Cinemark with an audience of oddballs wearing Next Generation uniforms, but I was just so happy to be there that their boorish disregard of canon didn’t matter.

Though opinions on its quality are on the upswing these days, Search for Spock was considered disappointing and slow-moving compared to Wrath of Khan back then, though not by me. It’s probably the most influential stretch of Star Trek that most fans don’t think about enough, solidifying the Klingon sense of honor, the Bird of Prey, and their consistent language. It also introduced the Excelsior, Spacedock, and the concept of the Vulcan katra.

It is probably my most watched movie, especially between 1987 when I asked my mom to record it off of cable while I was at my grandfather’s house and 1991 when I went off to college. I’ve said and written many times that The Wrath of Khan inspired me to turn myself around in high school, but I think Kirk’s line “I swear to you we’re not finished yet” may have been even more important to me.

I could perform the entire movie from memory with my friends Chris and Carl (though not at the same time because they hated each other), and it was a kind of language between us about what it meant to be honorable and loyal and bold despite officious bureaucracy. Are you really someone’s friend if you’re not willing to steal (and destroy) a starship to save their immortal soul?

I even included clips of it in audio notes to woo girls2:

Like my character Bud Castillo, I’ve always taken stories a bit more seriously than most people, and constant exposure to this movie every day after school or all summer certainly helped shape my ideas of conscience and integrity and determination. Last night, I just felt enormous gratitude3 to have been born when I was to experience this and Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Dead Poets Society and Dungeons & Dragons and Twin Peaks.

Maybe I’d feel the same about Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy had I been born then, or about Birth of a Nation, but this was what fell in my path.

  1. Like these: https://youtu.be/nE9B881GmmQ?si=pErZKEddwHygP4_w ↩︎
  2. You know, implying that romance is worth breaking some rules at warp speed. ↩︎
  3. And some sadness that I couldn’t share it with Carl or Chris. ↩︎